The advent of mobile communications, devices, sensors, wireless communication and communication networks provides the ability for users such as consumers to determine the providers' location, direction to the provider, and characteristics of the service or products that the providers' serves.
Such methods in the provision of information and interaction to the consumers and providers and other users are subject to real time variability of multi party and system parameters that are not visible and corrected to the actors in the system. These existing methods do not cater for the time variant and characteristics variant as users traverse through the sequence of events and time for the consumer arrival to the provider location or both consumer and provider's agent arrival to actualize the service, meeting, or the sales of product.
An example of such application is the health care industry, whereby the consumers are typically subjected to the content viewing of the provider's location, category and in some cases, availability. This open loop construct subjects consumers to wait time upon arrival, and providers faces challenges in instantaneous load of consumers' arrival, no show, and voids of underutilization if they take in appointments. Such variability changes according to type and category of patients, provider's category, physical environment (traffic, weather, location etc), seasonal load (flu epidemic, time of the year, day of the week etc) and cycle time, as well as doctors' arrival time (timing from surgery, outpatient consultation, research or visiting other hospitals and institutions).
In vehicle parking, some buildings provide real time information of car park lots available, which are made available in the form of web information, mobile information or local road transport signboard displays. To close the loop of visibility of the available parking lots to guaranteeing a place upon arrival time, methods such as booking service may be available in applications such as mobile applications or internet. Such services may employ predictive analytics to estimate the demand and supply to determine when the parking lots will be vacated to incorporate the advance pre-bookings or make the availability known to consumers to harness consumption. However, this is subject to model accuracy, assumptions, data size and real time variability of the users that may impair maximization of utilization of parking lots. It may also impose dissatisfaction of consumers who have booked the parking lot but suffer the penalty of grace time windows due to unforeseen conditions such as traffic conditions, weather or time latency that incurs variance between the estimated arrival time from the booked time.
In the food and beverage industry, provisions for information of dining places and availability are currently growing with the advent of location based advertisements. However, this may be limited to the existing location of the users, and consumers and providers are still subject to the challenges of wait time, no shows, and voids of underutilization if they take in booking. Again, imposing penalties to both the consumers and providers that warrant a delay to the intended time may take a toll in the satisfaction compounded by the vast competition in the landscape these days. This could result in loss of revenue from losing consumers when they switch providers.
As a result, there is a need for a novel approach that provides coalition in matching of the users' characteristics and requirements, and connects their availability to cater for the real time variability to the actualization of the event, to minimize loss time and maximize utilization and contextual flow for all actors in the system.